Short answer. Yes. Article 315 of the Revised Penal Code lists resorting to some fraudulent practice to insure success in a gambling game as one of the specific fraudulent means that constitutes estafa. The penalty scales with the amount defrauded, using the figures Republic Act No. 10951 set in 2017.
What the law says
Any person who shall defraud another by any of the means mentioned hereinbelow shall be punished
Revised Penal Code, Article 315 — Swindling (Estafa). Read the full provision →
What the law says
By resorting to some fraudulent practice to insure success in a gambling game.
Revised Penal Code, Article 315 — Swindling (Estafa). Read the full provision →
Estafa is defined by the means of defrauding, not just the harm
Article 315 opens by tying the crime to how someone was defrauded: Any person who shall defraud another by any of the means mentioned hereinbelow shall be punished. The article then works through a detailed list of specific fraudulent means, grouped into categories, and rigging a gambling game falls under one of them by name rather than by general inference.
The gambling-specific means, stated directly
Among the fraudulent means Article 315 lists is exactly the situation you describe: By resorting to some fraudulent practice to insure success in a gambling game. Manipulating cards, rigging equipment, or otherwise using a deceptive method to fix an outcome in a card game or other gambling game is named specifically, not left to be inferred from the article's more general fraud provisions.
What makes it fit this particular clause
This clause is about the method — a fraudulent practice used to insure success — rather than about the amount lost or the identity of the victim. Rigging the game is the fraudulent practice itself, and using it to fix a win at someone else's expense is what the clause describes, distinct from ordinary cheating that does not affect the game's actual outcome.
The penalty depends on the amount defrauded
Article 315 sets different penalties depending on how much the victim was defrauded of, rather than a single fixed punishment for all estafa. The amounts currently used to draw those lines come from Republic Act No. 10951, enacted in 2017, which revised the property values throughout the Revised Penal Code — older figures from the Code's original 1930 text no longer reflect the current thresholds. A source still quoting the pre-2017 amounts is describing a version of Article 315 that no longer states the applicable penalty brackets, which matters if you are trying to gauge how seriously a rigged-game estafa case is likely to be treated.
What this ground does not cover
This clause is about a fraudulent practice used to fix an outcome — it does not, by itself, criminalize gambling or a particular game as such, nor does it cover a player simply losing fairly through skill or luck. Ordinary bad luck, a legitimate strategy, or a game played honestly falls outside Article 315 entirely; what the law reaches is the deceptive manipulation used to insure a result at another person's expense.